Moving Parts (12 page)

He cannot refrain from asking bitterly who is actually in charge in this space, who has placed the various figures in it, who set the events in motion. It may be that the principal matters are resolved in the mechanisms of grammar, in the inscrutable moving parts of the elevators. He who slept through the
scene in the garden, the lavishly illuminated climax, is probably still under the illusion that nothing can happen here without his knowledge and without his will. Occupied with his own affairs, he only infrequently and sparingly gives his distracted attention to the story, and his overweening pride leads him to believe that this is sufficient, and that anything he touches, however casually, will immediately become transformed into precious metal. And yet he does not know everything that goes on behind his back, between the lines of the text, in the dark corners behind the paragraphs. Story lines that he ordered to be concluded and cut off are unfolding on the quiet – proof that his will does not determine everything. Where now is the black automobile loaded with luggage? Perhaps in a ditch, out of gas, pushed aside by the throng like all the other cars. Fojchtmajer and his family are among those wandering the roads on foot, sleeping in barns; the autumn is a warm one. Until winter comes they can manage like this. In any case, a simple accident will free Fojchtmajer from the arduous obligation of surviving the winter, and the frost will never touch him. Before it can strike, soldiers in gray-green uniforms will appear on motorcycles – two privates and a sergeant. The cause of the far-reaching disruption that arises suddenly from their presence may turn out to be some denunciation linking the person of Fojchtmajer with the Polish Word publishing house. For someone up above, this could serve as a convenient excuse to close this bothersome story line once and for all. At the decisive moment
Fojchtmajer's wife disowned him without hesitation, and so convincingly that she rescued the children from danger. He was present at the time, and appreciated the ease with which she lied; he felt relieved and grateful. And so his wife and children are in the crowd, while Fojchtmajer stands to one side now, his hands raised, under guard. Betrayed, three times betrayed. He will exchange a word with one of the privates; his wife waits anxiously for a sign, for after all she loves him as much as she is able. With a helpless smile Fojchtmajer shakes his head: Nothing can be done.

The elevator, as could have been predicted with even the faintest idea of the way of things, will not stop at the first floor. It will transpire that the first floor was never in the running as a scene of the action; the elevator descends lower and lower, moving ever more rapidly, till it comes to a stop with a sudden jolt. It is only now that the door will open. It isn't the only elevator in the large lobby where the narrator has found himself. Steel doors slide open and shut; now here, now there, small red lights flash over them. The tiled floor is strewn with handfuls of loose straw; sheaves of straw lie about, and straw mattresses block hallways that lead in every direction, echoing with moans and permeated with the smell of disinfectant. Let's say that the exhausted doctor, the only one in the entire field hospital, in civilian life was the youngest assistant of the senior registrar in a university hospital; he had hoped to specialize in, for instance, gynecology. Instead of this he is battling gangrene with the
aid of a surgical saw, assisted by a perpetually sleep-deprived orderly whose suspenders dangle beneath an ill-fitting white coat. The orderly is more vigorous all the same; he handles all the paperwork himself. What can they talk about, looking hard at one another through reddened eyes? Between them lies a stack of forms completed in the careful handwriting of a postal clerk only recently forced to give up his first ever appointment. The doctor's gold-rimmed glasses flash. He is indignant. This patient isn't dead yet, he remarks, thumbing through the forms; nor this other one, nor that one. Later there'll be no time for paperwork; in this matter the orderly is undeniably right. With a vulgar curse, the doctor signs death certificates in advance. Formalities are easy. Nothing matters to those lying on the mattresses, gasping for breath; they no longer have any other desires. Their massed breathing is interspersed with whistles and hisses, then turns into groans, the bubbling of loose coughs, sobs, and hoarse rattles, interrupted all of a sudden by snorts that sound like giggles. The less seriously wounded slurp soup from tin bowls. On these lower floors of the hotel the body seizes the moment, greedy and certain of nothing. Personnel and freight elevators go up and down, bringing ever more consignments of wounded. Buckets are filled with bloody dressings fashioned from bed linen, some with shreds of lace still attached to them – improvised bandages that in most cases were of little avail. Over the refuse there is a buzzing – flies have gathered here from all the floors. Those that were looking for
an open window and those that kept circling beneath lamps. They are always drawn to places where life is harder. At the end of their journey hangs flypaper. They squirm about on it in vain. They do not realize that the long series of rooms from which there was no good way out ends precisely here.

Stretchers glide by bearing discolored fatigues, school uniforms, pure wool suits riddled with bullet holes, flowery cretonne frocks. With an infallible eye the orderly tells life from death and points the bodies in the appropriate direction. One of the stretcher bearers limps as if he were dancing. He miraculously managed to save his walkman and headphones and he himself also miraculously survived, plucked out of some African backwater from which no one else emerged alive. The other stretcher bearer steps behind the first, seeing nothing, clinging to the stretcher. From the plight he found himself in, probably somewhere in the Caucasus, he saved everything except his sight, and now he raises his feet high, afraid of stumbling. They go back and forth; at a certain moment they will bring in Fojchtmajer's wife with a round hole in the back of her head, dragged by a military policeman from a cart full of people and shot to death on the spot. The children are riding on among strangers. The narrator will find it hardest to conclude the matter of the children. Since the Fojchtmajers stopped at nothing, accepting every kind of humiliation, willing to bear anything for their sake, the children ought to be spared. But the lowest floors of the hotel know no pity. Here no one has the time or
the inclination to worry about individual fates. There is no way of counting how many women have passed through the place, each with a round hole in the back of her head, taken from buses and trains in which their children continued on. In the lobby there is a feverish commotion: The center of the room must be cleared, right away. The walking wounded hurriedly push the last mattresses against the wall, for those lying on them are delirious from fever and cannot help. Gazes stray upward and are lost beneath a ceiling so high it cannot be seen. But they at least latch onto a dark shape gradually descending ever lower. A substantial hull can already be made out. The orderly makes a call, trying to arrange something; he shouts into the receiver, but at the other end of the line it seems he cannot be heard. A German gunboat slowly drops onto the floor, a rusty white waterline on its side; it is full of dead sailors in navy blue uniforms and round caps bearing the inscription Kriegsmarine. The boat settles with a groan and tilts over, creaking at its seams. The captain, immaculately dressed, is still on the bridge; his wide-open eyes no longer see anything through his gold-rimmed glasses.

Here the story branches off in every direction; the hallways leading from the lobby seem to have no end and one can imagine innumerable further branches, just as overcrowded and stinking just the same of disinfectant; they gradually enter the territories occupied by the mortuary and governed by its laws. The transitional zone includes the resting place for instance
of unshaven Russian prisoners of war staring with glazed eyes into the void. Accustomed since childhood to sleeping in gray underwear, to wretched canteens, and to rules and regulations that outlaw expressions of freedom, they shouldn't complain about their captivity, even if they have died from hunger and cold. No more mass parades await them and they lack for nothing. Their rest is shared by German prisoners of war, who were fortunate enough to survive the confusion of battle and then froze in the ice and snow of Kamchatka. They set off for the east when the grass was probably still green. It was only in the newsreels that it turned out to be gray. Clouds swirling like high seas chase across the sky. Somewhere outside the frame is concealed a symphony orchestra; the bombastic rumble of timpani and the crash of cymbals sound the loudest. The stiffened bodies no longer hear anything now. They melt slowly; at times a transparent tear flows from beneath an eyelid and down a cheek. The story has no sharp boundaries. That is why it must include so many dead. Neither the prisoners of war nor the civilians have been granted the reprieve of an easy death. Their spilled blood soaks into the earth, and with it despair. Wounded feelings do not decompose quickly; their traces contaminate the soil for years afterward,like a fatal deposit of lead. Mention should be made of all the stories of walls and ceilings, weighing down like an inconsolable sense of wrong. Of the torment of unutterable boredom from which there is no longer any escape. Chance passers-by, torn by the flashes of explosions from
crowds pressing along shopping streets, lie in black plastic bags stacked in layers. The dead, caught in the trap of the same story as always, in the end are left with nothing but their bodies, dispossessed of all rights. All are made of the same clay, with the same parting on the top of their heads and fingers yellowed from smoking. They are distinguished by their memories, but the memories are inaccessible. The body is like a millstone with which dreams are weighed down so they will drown once and for all. Unimaginably lonely narrators would never be permitted to have a say in anything except grammatical forms; it was their lot to bear responsibility without a trace of influence on the course of events, and now they are filling cellars the length and breadth of the world, all the way to the seas: the Blue, the Green, the Yellow, and even the White – all resembling the Dead. The waters do not mix. The bodies rest on the bottom, tangled in seaweed.

The narrator sees that the story has slipped out of his hands, or so it seems to him. From the beginning it pulled in its own direction; everything in it was determined ahead of time. He has run out of strength and hope; he has a desire to fall asleep with his head resting against the wall, nothing more. Instead of which he will become a messenger. He thrusts into his pocket a plan penciled on the back of an unused form. Apparently up there, on the next floor, it's possible to get a better night's sleep in a vacant camp bed with real sheets. In the meantime the orderly is sounding the floor and gazing at the doctor. Neither
of them expects the floor beams to hold out much longer. A team of welders must be found immediately to cut open the hull of the sunken gunboat. Underneath there is nothing else, no foundations, only a bottomless chasm; and if the thin floor gives away, battered mattresses and hospital screens will go flying in disarray into the chasm of these lower heavens, and with them surgical instruments, used bandages, and slop buckets splashing their contents about in the mad rush. The map consists of a sketched fragment of the labyrinth of hallways, with an arrow indicating the place where the addressee of the message, dressed in blue overalls, should be sought. A second arrow shows the location of the promised camp bed. The outer door of the freight elevator closes behind the narrator. In the wan light of a dusty bulb any button can be selected – naturally it has no significance whatever. The narrator recognizes the cracked pane of the inner door. Now the elevator moves upwards, and along with it the sentence in which it appeared for the first time, and the last one in which it was rediscovered by chance.

To the question of why it does not stop at the next floor, where the narrator might run across the welders capable of averting a disaster, the answer should be that all floors are of equal worth. It is known that from the very beginning the elevator did not stop at every one. Nobody here could see beyond what is visible; the narrator is subject to the same limitation. It doesn't seem as if the stops of the freight elevator are governed by someone's will. They are decided rather by the tangle of
wires tumbling out of an instrument panel, arbitrary electrical impulses that follow various paths in their own particular order. In this way the Warsaw Uprising does not break out and is not suppressed, and there do not appear drunken officers of the Soviet secret police hammering their fists on the table. There are no cheering crowds with red banners, nor mass songs, nor tanks driving out onto sleeping streets in a snowbound winter. Selecting a floor, the elevator regulates the movement of adverbial phrases, while they in turn trim the story lines short; restricting time and place, they dwell on manner and pass over cause in silence. They reduce the plot to a minimum. But it is not they who are the essence of the invisible structure, just as it is not the ropes strung over the abyss, nor the ocean currents, nor the precipitous lines of the graphs of market reports in the Financial Times. Its core and foundation may turn out to be the predicates of sentences, which as a rule are unfeeling and, like judicial sentences, irreversible. No one knows where they come from; the narrator does not know either. They become visible only when they are firmly fixed in tenses; they take the space of the sentences into their possession. And when they pass on, a void is left behind.

The elevator stops with an unimaginable clatter at the train station. At the end of the platform, far in the distance, there can even be seen the colorful splash of a poster with a couple kissing on a steep rooftop; the image can barely be made out in the foreshortened perspective. The rails rumble; it is the train, traveling
in a circle so that the madman with the starting pistol can continue to bully the old man in the red dressing gown and humiliate the hobo, all in the presence of the girl with the provocative makeup. Beyond the door of the elevator there open up expanses of possibilities that will never be fully explored. But the narrator is not curious about them. He guesses that he ought not to leave the elevator as it stops at successive floors. At most, at the next one he'll block the door with his foot, lean out and, holding up a cigarette lighter – a commemorative gift, though not for him, and never mind who it was from – he will see a perished gas mask abandoned by the door. Things will return to their places: the shoddily plastered walls, the low ceilings, the dust-covered floors with puddles here and there over which droplets of rusty water hang from joints in the piping – if one falls, another will immediately take its place. Straining one's ears, one might hear the tower of cans crashing down in the house with the garden. Many floors above, the dingy landing remains in place, seemingly inaccessible; yet the elevator in fact stops there too, opposite the familiar door marked with a half-effaced figure of a man, as if in a dream. The external world puts up no more resistance. If the unexpectedly happy ending does not arouse the narrator's suspicions it is only because he is collapsing from exhaustion. But he is already on the landing; he discards the map scribbled on the back of the form, and the elevator takes it away, back into the depths of the dark shaft. The narrator isn't even sure if at this exact moment the lower floors
still exist. On the upper floors this can never be known for certain. And if the lower floors have already caved in, that means the remaining floors are now the last, in the grip of fever and commotion. But in a place where leather sofas exude the cool tranquility of affluence, it can be believed to the very end that the upper floors will never become the lower ones. The narrator, too, wishes to believe this. He looks for his keys. Where have they gone? Were they left down below, along with his jacket? He has them. They're not lost – he's found them in the pocket of his pants. He doesn't know if he should first open the room with the balcony or the door to the bathroom. He opens the room. He immediately becomes aware of a sizeable dark object on the bed. A little evening light falls on the object from the balcony window; it looks like an instrument case. The figure seated in the armchair the narrator notices only after a moment. So someone must have been waiting for him to come back, for goodness knows how many hours, till finally he fell asleep. His hunched back can be seen. A hand hanging over the arm of the chair is almost touching the floor. The hand is black.